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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   38426 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 27, 2023

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This is the main thrust of it from Matt Taibbi from his statement to congress this month. I don't know why they released the leaks as tweets; it's impossible to find specific receipts for these statements when they're broken up between 20 threads over several accounts...

We saw the first hints in communications between Twitter executives before the 2020 election, where we read things like:

Hi team, can we get your opinion on this? This was flagged by DHS:

Or:

Please see attached report from the FBI for potential misinformation.

This would be attached to excel spreadsheet with a long list of names, whose accounts were often suspended shortly after.

We learned Twitter, Facebook, Google, and other companies developed a formal system for taking in moderation “requests” from every corner of government: the FBI, DHS, HHS, DOD, the Global Engagement Center at State, even the CIA. For every government agency scanning Twitter, there were perhaps 20 quasi-private entities doing the same, including Stanford’s Election Integrity Project, Newsguard, the Global Disinformation Index, and others, many taxpayer-funded.

A focus of this fast-growing network is making lists of people whose opinions, beliefs, associations, or sympathies are deemed “misinformation,” “disinformation,” or “malinformation.” The latter term is just a euphemism for “true but inconvenient.”

Ordinary Americans are not just being reported to Twitter for “deamplification” or de-platforming, but to firms like PayPal, digital advertisers like Xandr, and crowdfunding sites like GoFundMe. These companies can and do refuse service to law-abiding people and businesses whose only crime is falling afoul of a distant, faceless, unaccountable, algorithmic judge.

Another troubling aspect is the role of the press, which should be the people’s last line of defense.

But instead of investigating these groups, journalists partnered with them. If Twitter declined to remove an account right away, government agencies and NGOs would call reporters for the New York Times, Washington Post, and other outlets, who in turn would call Twitter demanding to know why action had not been taken.

By implied threat of regulation I mean the unsaid thing that would be on these companies' minds when they received a communication like this — what will they do to us if we refuse to comply? These requests weren't based off a legitimate court order, just the government saying "We'd really like it if you stopped this person from saying things we don't like." Right now they're doing the most they think they can get away with, ReportMaxxing and informal requests, so if given increased jurisdiction over content we have good reason to suspect what they'd immediately start doing with it.

I don't know why they released the leaks as tweets;

Wasn't it part of the agreement that got them access to the internal data in the first place? A quid pro quo that benefits the platform. Taibbi does have an index of the threads with executive summaries on his news website/substack.

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